Hunting for Foxes with Sheaves Michael Robinson Introduction Michael Robinson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mathemat- To a radio amateur (or “ham”), fox hunting has nothing ics and Statistics at American University. His email address is michaelr to do with animals. It is a sport in which individuals race @american.edu. All figures can be reproduced using The Jupyter Notebook at: https://github For permission to reprint this article, please contact: .com/kb1dds/foxsheaf.
[email protected]. Communicated by Notices Associate Editor Emilie Purvine. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1090/noti1867 MAY 2019 NOTICES OF THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY 661 each other to locate a hidden radio transmitter on a known We are left with the need for a general deterministic frequency. Since hams are encouraged to design and build method for finding the fox from a small number ofmea- their own equipment, the typical fox hunt involves a vari- surements. This article explains how to meet this need us- ety of different receivers and antennas with different ca- ing sheaves, mathematical objects that describe local consis- pabilities. Some of these can display the received signal tency within data. We can perform data fusion for any sheaf, strength from the hidden transmitter (loosely measuring though the fox hunting problem will guide our selection distance to the transmitter), while others estimate the com- of the specific sheaf we need and will be the context for pass bearing. Both of these estimates vary in accuracy and its interpretation. The resulting fox hunting sheaf is mod- in precision depending on terrain, environmental condi- ular; different sensors or models of their performance can tions, equipment quality, and the skill of the operator.